Welcome back to Season 11 of the Neuroscience Meets Social and Emotional Learning Podcast! In episode 335, we delve into the neuroscience of emotion regulation, a crucial skill for personal and professional success. Host Andrea Samadi continues the 18-week self-leadership series inspired by Grant Bosnick’s book, focusing on strategies to enhance our ability to manage emotions effectively.
We explore practical tips from Bosnick, such as labeling emotions, creating distance from them, and reframing situations to view them more positively. Additionally, we highlight the importance of sleep for emotion regulation, drawing insights from experts like Dr. Andrew Huberman and Dr. Matthew Walker. Discover how improving your sleep quality can lead to better emotional control and overall well-being.
Join us as we connect the dots between neuroscience, sleep, and emotional intelligence to help you achieve greater heights in 2024 and beyond.
On today's episode #335 we continue with our 18-Week Self-Leadership Series based on Grant Bosnick’s “Tailored Approaches to Self-Leadership: A Bite Size Approach Using Psychology and Neuroscience” that we first dove into with our interview on EP #321[i] the end of January.  The goal was that each week, we focused on learning something new, (from Grant’s book) that builds off the prior week, to help take us to greater heights in 2024.

 
For Today, EPISODE #335, we are moving on to Chapter 9, covering “The Neuroscience of Emotion Regulation” which showed up on my leadership self-assessment as a low, RED score, of 20%, but again, not because it’s not something I don’t need to pay attention to, this is something I pay attention to daily, right up there with physical health that is listed in Pathway Four of Grant’s Self-Leadership Map.

If you’ve taken the leadership self-assessment[ii], look to see if Emotion Regulation is of a low, medium or high priority for you to focus on this year.
Before looking at what Grant Bosnick has to say about Emotion Regulation in Chapter 9 of his book, I looked around to see what else I could find on this topic.
We actually have already covered this topic as one of the six social emotional learning competencies that we launched this podcast with, back in August, 2019[iii] and we called that episode “Self-Regulation: The Foundational Learning Skill for Future Success.”  In this early episode, we defined self-regulation as “the ability to manage your emotions and behavior in accordance of the situation. It includes being able to resist highly emotional reactions to upsetting stimuli, to calm yourself down when you get upset, adjust to a change in expectations and (the ability) to handle frustration”[iv] In other words, it’s the ability to bounce back after a setback or disappointment, and the ability to stay in congruence with your inner value system. 

HOW TO HELP OUR CHILDREN WITH EMOTION REGULATION:
We covered some tips on this early episode to help our children to practice this skill, and strengthen their “self-regulation” muscles, beginning with:
Naming the emotion they are experiencing at a given moment, with a strategy (like stopping to take some deep breaths when something frustrates or overwhelms them) so they can keep working, and move forward.
Uncovering what motivates each of us to develop intrinsic motivation that can help propel us forward.
Taking brain breaks, or “unfocused moments” that allow for the brain to solve problems during these resting states.
WHAT GRANT BOSNICK SUGGESTS FOR EMOTION REGULATION:
Then we covered some tips to help us to continue to strengthen these self-regulation skills in the workplace, and I wondered what Grant Bosnick had to say in chapter 9 of his book on this topic. Within the second paragraph of this chapter, he explains the science behind emotion regulation when he outlines that “neuroscience has shown us that the exact same feelings we get from a physical threat also occur as social and emotional threats.” (Page 91, Chapter 9,